QANUS :: Question-Answering (QA) System

This is the official page for QANUS --- an open-source question-answering (QA) system that I have developed.

You can read more about QANUS on this page "What is QANUS?". This is a framework upon which new QA systems can be rapidly and easily developed. QANUS is also shipped with complete QA modules and can function as a simple baseline for other QA systems. The QA modules will be kept updated so that QANUS can serve as an adequate baseline.

To try out QANUS, please hop on to the "Download" page where you can download the full source code of my work, as well as some documentation to help you better understand this framework.

The plans I have instore for QANUS are found on the "Development Roadmap" page. Please do not hesitate to forward me any suggestions you have for the system, it would be great if we can fully exploit the potential of QANUS as a development framework for QA systems.

Work on QANUS is on-going as I type. So do check back with this site for updates often! To make it convenient to stay up-to-date with the developments for QANUS, you may also want to track the RSS feed for this blog page.

Those of you who tried to download QANUS recently may have ran into problems. We had an unfortunate hard disk failure on our server recently, and it took a while before we managed to fix everything.

Please do try again if you didn't manage to download QANUS, the link should be functioning properly now!

The online demo is still down however. We didn't have a proper backup of the online system, and it will take a while for us to re-construct the demo system again. Our apologies!

It has been a while since there were any updates to QANUS. We have added a paper describing the QANUS framework in the Downloads section. Do check it out to get a better idea of what the framework is all about.

The online demo is also experiencing a lot of down-time recently. We have traced the problem to the named entity recognition module which we are connecting to as a web service. We will try to improve the stability of the module, failing which we will likely revert to a local version instead. This will add about 10 seconds to every query response time and is not the most favoured solutions, but we'd see how the fix to the web service pans out.

There has been a major re-structuring of QANUS. The changes are included in this latest update to v26Jan2010.

For readers who have been following the project, you would have noted that QANUS provides a framework on which new QA systems can be built. To verify the flexibility of the framework, a reference implementation of a QA system has also been built on top of QANUS, and has been bundled together with QANUS.

In this latest version, the source code has been re-structured so that there is now a very distinct segregation between the QANUS framework and the reference QA system. For a detailed update on the new structure, please do refer to the documentation that accompanies this new version of QANUS.

Both the new source code and the updated documentation are now available from the Download page.

I hope that this update would make QANUS all the better. Do drop me your comments and feedback!

Here's a teaser! QANUS is currently going through a huge re-structuring. The codes and functionalities are largely unchanged. However we are re-arranging the interfaces and coupling between the various parts of the framework.

The changes will make QANUS more developer/user friendly. QANUS is actually a QA framework for you to build your own QA systems. However to make it more useful, we have also actually implemented a sample QA system on top of the framework. The current structure does not differentiate between the framework and the sample system sufficiently.

For more detailed information, stay tuned to the upcoming updates to the accompanying documentation.

If you intend to download QANUS within the short term (a week or so!), do take note that the new re-structured version would be out very soon!

QANUS has received a big update (now v04Jan2010). As promised in an earlier post, this update includes the improvements to QANUS done over the new year.

Most of the work revolved around updating the answer retrieval module shipped with QANUS. The original one was a relatively basic one which did not manage to turn in correct answers most of the time.

The current answer retrieval module:

1. Makes use of known IR-based methods to extract the correct answer string, such as
• Named entity recognition (with Stanford's NER)
• Question classification (with Li and Roth 2002)
• Validation (primitive) with Freebase
• Significant number of hand-written regular expression patterns
2. Supports factoid questions
3. Achieves an accuracy of 12.5% when run over TREC-2007 QA test questions

We know that it's not perfect, and we are hungry for better accuracy. Work will continue to further improve this answer retrieval module.